Re–Inventing the American Modern Interior: Visual Dissections and Retroactive Montages

Abstract

This visual essay is the outcome of a research trip through Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, an "on the road trip" designed to discover some of the most representative domestic and urban Modern American interiors. The focus of this work was an investigation of places, cities, and buildings, dealing with the experience of space in the first place but, most of all, aims to understand and develop architectural themes, design processes, compositional principles, and project strategies. The tool for this analysis is a montage (of photographs, images, documents, textures, materials) that, after dissections and distillations, expresses the character and the concept of the building.In the summer of 2018, I had the opportunity to explore the Midwest/Northeast regions of the United States-thanks to a scholarship-visiting some seminal buildings and urban places related to Modernism. The investigation has been, for me, an "on the road trip" on the footsteps of Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Burnham, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, and Albert Khan, in order to discover, approach, and perceive not only the buildings but also the quality of the "big interior" of American natural and urban landscape. On one hand, I was looking for architectural or specifically domestic environments, typically related to the word "interior." On the other, I was seeking to extend the meaning of this word and concept beyond the limits of the typical realm of the discipline of interior design. This effort was fueled by my own desire to bind urban and architectural issues in relation to one another, a position upheld by Leon Battista Alberti's statement that considers the city a large house and the house a large city: "If (as the philosophers maintain) the city is like some large house, and the house is in turn like some small city, cannot the various parts of the house-atria, xysti, dining rooms, porticos, and so on-be considered miniature buildings?" 1 From Renaissance, this interpretation flowed through history, toward the theoretical positions of Bruno Zevi, Aldo Rossi, and Aldo Van Eyck. I found that this background and engagement aligned with the contemporary position in the international debate that considers the interior not only related to the architectural private realm of the building but also to a wider scenario that involves the public scale of the city and its environment, with a fruitful intersection of disciplines, theories, and practices. 2